Marin Voice: The March on Washington 50 Years Later

THERE ARE Marinites who 50 years ago missed the March on Washington. Their opportunity to commemorate the historic event takes place Aug. 28, where, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, President Barack Obama will deliver an update of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

The obscure history behind the march is often overlooked, ignored or has gone unreported. The perspective of time has benefited scholars and the public. We now have a greater understanding of one of the most transformative assemblages in American history.

The idea for the march germinated in the spring of 1941. Labor Leader A. Phillip Randolph, in protest of employment discrimination in defense related industries, amassed a comprehensive coalition of thousands of middle and working class African Americans and their allies. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis recounts: "On the eve of the march on Washington, three days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union".... (on) June 25th 1941, the president signed the historic Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defense related industries."

Fast forward a quarter century. The searchlight of hope illumined by the 1954 Brown desegregation decision had sadly dimmed. Lagging enforcement of the court decision, the Emmett Till lynching, the reluctant presidential intervention on behalf of the Little Rock students, the resistance to the Freedom Riders and a host of other setbacks set the stage for a new march on Washington.

Again, it was A. Phillip Randolph at the fore with Deputy Bayard Rustin. This time a coalition of civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and key individuals, among them Roy Wilkins, John Lewis and the Rev. Martin Luther King, assisted in the organizing.

More than the glitterati was the fascinating jockeying behind the scenes: the insistence by Archbishop O'Boyle and others to tone down the speech of John Lewis (all speeches were limited to seven minutes); the reluctance of the Kennedys, the president and the attorney general to participate due to the possibility but ultimately the non-occurrence of rowdy behavior or violence.

Historian Lewis credits colleague Thomas Gentile with amassing statistics: 21 charter trains pulled in the morning of the march along with buses pouring through the Baltimore tunnel at the rate of 100 per hour to swell the ranks of the participants to an estimated 250,000. An 82-year-old bicycled from Ohio while another skated from South Dakota.

According to Lewis, President Kennedy and military chiefs ordered 4,000 troops on standby in the suburbs with 15,000 paratroopers on alert in North Carolina.

For the first time since Prohibition, liquor sales were banned in D.C. No elective surgery was scheduled for the day of the march. To avoid possible losses from potential looting, many shop owners transferred goods to warehouses.

Due to careful planning, logistics and shared high purpose none of the negatives happened.

In a post-march White House gathering, the president and his aides marveled at the peaceful, productive assembly. Kennedy was duly impressed by the oratorical power of King.

The civil rights torch symbolically passed to King that day. The night before, W.E.B. Du Bois died. He was born in 1868 when Frederick Douglass was America's undisputed black leader, and battled Douglass' putative successor, Booker T. Washington, in his epoch 1903 work "Souls of Black Folk" and later helped found the NAACP.

Noah Griffin of Tiburon is a public affairs consultant and a former community member of the IJ's editorial board.